Prince Harry’s ghostwriter, JR Moehringer, says
pair bonded over media intrusion
Author says paparazzi and reporters began to follow
him in his car and snoop around his home
Helen
Sullivan
@helenrsullivan
Mon 8 May
2023 23.35 EDT
Prince
Harry’s ghostwriter has said he bonded with his subject over the “callousness”
of paparazzi and media after the “frenzied mob” around the book Spare led to
photographers and journalists invading his own privacy.
In a
first-person piece for the New Yorker, JR Moehringer, the celebrated
ghostwriter behind Spare said he agreed to write Harry’s memoir because he
“just liked the dude” and had recently lost his own mother.
“I wondered
if we’d have any chemistry. We did, and there was, I think, a surprising
reason. Diana, Princess of Wales, had died 23 years before our first conversation,
and my mother, Dorothy Moehringer, had just died, and our griefs felt equally
fresh,” he wrote.
“I think I
selfishly welcomed the idea of being able to speak with someone, an expert,
about that never-ending feeling of wishing you could call your mom.”
The book
took over two years to write, with Moehringer and Harry meeting over Zoom
during the pandemic and exchanging text messages “round the clock”. When travel
restriction eased, Moehringer went to stay at a guesthouse on Harry and
Meghan’s ranch in Montecito, California, where “Meghan and Archie would visit
me on their afternoon walks. Meghan, knowing I was missing my family, was
forever bringing trays of food and sweets.”
When news
of the memoir leaked, writes Moehringer, “one royal expert cautioned that,
because of my involvement in the book, Harry’s father should be ‘looking for a
pile of coats to hide under’,” because of what Moehringer describes as his own
“daddy issues”. He has written about his absent father and his close
relationship with his single mother in his own memoir, The Tender Bar.
Spare went
on to become the bestselling nonfiction book of all time. Its success also led
to fevered media attention, and Moehringer recounts paparazzi and reporters
starting to intrude on his personal life, following him in his car, showing up
outside his son’s preschool and snooping around his home. “[…] I looked up to
see a woman’s face at my window. As if in a dream, I walked to the window and
asked, ‘Who are you?’ Through the glass, she whispered, ‘I’m from the Mail on
Sunday’.”
With
tabloid attention came errors and lies, he writes, where “innocent passages”
were “hyped into outrages”. Among these was a mistranslation that led news
outlets to report that Harry had described “mounting” the woman to whom he lost
his virginity. “I can assert with one-hundred-per-cent confidence that no one
gets ‘mounted,’ quickly or otherwise, in Spare,” he writes.
When he
complained to Harry “fictions about me were spreading and hardening into
orthodoxy” – among them that he had been introduced to Harry by George Clooney
– the prince “tilted his head: Welcome to my world, dude. By now, Harry was
calling me dude.”
In the New
Yorker piece, Moehringer, who also worked as a ghostwriter for Andre Agassi and
Nike founder Phil Knight, recounts pushing back on Harry’s request to include a
comeback he made during a military exercise in which he was involved in a
simulated kidnapping.
During the
exercise, one of his pretend captors made a “vile dig” at Diana. Harry wanted
his remark included because people had “belittled his intellectual
capabilities” and he wanted to show that he had said something clever.
Moehringer
refused, saying it would detract from the meaning of the scene, which was
actually that, “even at the most bizarre and peripheral moments of his life,
his central tragedy intrudes”.
Harry, he
says, “couldn’t escape the wish that Spare might be a rebuttal to every lie
ever published about him.”
The book
included explosive details, including Harry taking drugs as a teenager, a
scuffle between Harry and his brother, Prince William, fights between Meghan
and the Princess of Wales over bridesmaids’ dresses, and the assertion that
William and Kate were behind Harry’s choice of a Nazi costume at a 2005 fancy
dress party.
He accused
his family having “a huge level of unconscious bias” and said it failed to
protect Meghan from attacks in the press.
Harry
travelled alone to his father’s coronation on 6 May, which was held on the same
day as his son Archie’s birthday, and made a swift exit afterwards.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário